#MovieSeries930
HEADS UP: The remaining Lincoln Movie Series screenings have been rescheduled and moved to 9:30 Club. All tickets will be honored at their new location and date.
‘Blazing Saddles’ will now be shown on 9/1 at 9:30 Club.
In his third film, Mel Brooks takes on the behemoth genre of the Western in what will be a touchstone picture of his style of over-the-top satire. When construction of the railroad finds the town of Rock Ridge in its way of continued development, the scheming State Attorney General Hedley Lamarr (no, not Hedy) comes up with a plan to drive off the exclusively white residents of the town: kill their sheriff and replace him with a black railroad worker, thus using their racial bias to create the chaos he needs to seal the rail deal. Blazing Saddles works as both a send-up of the Western genre and a study of racism and bias in America, using the 1874 backdrop to talk about the state of race relations in 1974. This is especially evident when considering the script is co-penned by Richard Pryor, who was supposed to star in the film were it not for the studio refusing to cast him ostensibly due to his drug arrests making him uninsurable. The studio also constantly tried to get Brooks to change the film (Brooks later added that he would also receive complaint letters after its release about its content with, “but of course, most of them were white people”), but Brooks, his writing team, and his all-star ensemble cast would be proven right: the film secured three Oscar nominations, won the Writers Guild Award for Best Original Comedy Screenplay, and was selected for preservation into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2006.
